The Man Who Killed FDR

Another Nick Carrier Cheboygan Mystery…

 

The Man Who Killed FDR — Chapter One

 

 

A Novella by Don Lewis and Sally Savic 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nick Carrier figured he’d have a while before he’d have to do anything like he did with the Saiget mysteries.

He’d been shot at twice, wounded once. He’d turned into something like an obessed detective. He’d run into a voice from the past in Cheboygan. The voice had sticky tentacles that held onto the present and wanted a hand in the future. The voice almost got his best friend and his daughter killed. Only luck and few extra seconds had been the difference between tragedy and the way it turned out. He could use a break from that kind of terror for the rest of life.  

He was wrong. The break didn’t last longer than a few months.

He’d found a journal in the wall by his desk the night they broke everything apart inside  the Tribune building. Better open space, communication, and lower heating bills, the publisher had said. Nick had seen the edge of leather bound book when he’d bent over to tie his shoes. It was spring and the first thunderstorm of the year was pounding on the roof and flooding the streets. He’d pulled it out and dusgted it off and read it until his eyes got red and closed him off from reading any further. 

The name on the mouse-eaten insde first page had said Turner Watson. Underneath it was stamped “Cheboygan, Michigan.”

What Nick read blew his mind.  

 

Ten years have passed since I escaped with my life and . It was when I knew a man had been murdered and when I tried to do something about it, all I could do was try and save a bunch of lives of people I cared about. 

It was the spring of 1945…

I drove down a dirt road hot with fever to report the big news and sad as hell like everybody else. I followed behind a caravan of Fords and Chryslers and mostly big shot Southern reporters. My mouth filled with dust.

Mixed in between were a few delivery trucks bringing in food for a dead president. Lazy pines swung in the winds like they were dancing a waltz.

My idea was to get to a phone even though American Telegraph only had lines for the big metros and bureaus. I’d slipped fifty bucks into the Valvoline covered hands of a thin black man named Sam Swinehart at the spa garage two days before because I needed the interview with Roosevelt. I wanted to hook on with a big city paper. Now the old man was gone.

I hadn’t been away from the Straits of Mackinac for five years but now I was in the right place at the right time for the first time in my life because I’d picked Georgia on the map at random for my wartime vacation.

I cranked down the window and followed the troupe of vehicles as close as I could. As he swallowed more dust I threw my spare shirt over the Kodak and pressed down on the accelerator. I thought about my two brothers, Alex and Robbie. One got popped in the Hedge Rows and the other on a crummy little island in the Pacific.

I stayed on the bumper of the Reuters boys.

Next to me on the seat was my upside down fedora with my wallet and wedding ring inside. I figured both were worth nothing so they belonged with each other. Charlotte was living in Grand Rapids with her mom and dad. They all thought I was a hard-drinking selfish bastard. It was probably true though I sent my check every two weeks and lived on the kindness of bartenders around Cheboygan and my editor’s reluctant generosity.

Ahead the cars slowed down and then pulled over. Reporters and photographers jumped out and ran to the front steps where an old Negro started playing Nearer My God to Thee on his accordion. A news brief was scheduled for 2:00 p.m. The funeral cortege was supposed to arrive mid afternoon and start Roosevelt on his last trip to Washington.

My garage guy waved me into the stable barn where the President’s creamy white Packard convertible waited in vain for him like the rest of the country.

“What’s the scoop?” I asked.

“Go head. Use the phone if you want to.” Swinehart dripped transmission fluid into the Packard like a bartender pouring a martini.

“I don’t really have an angle. I came to get an interview not watch them carry the old man out in a box.”

“I’ll give you an angle but you won’t believe me.”

“What angle?”

“Somebody’s been putting smoething in his tea.”

“What are you talkin’ about, Sam.”

“That’s all I’m gonna tell you. That’s all I know.”

“He had a God damned cerebral hemorrhage for Christ’s sake.”

“Maybe.”

“You mean someone’s been poisoning him?”

“You seen him lately. That’s the look of poison.”

“You’re nuts.”

Nick sat in his aprtment and listened to the wind whistling through the Staits. He kept reading the musty journal.

Through the garage door I saw the big paper guys and their photo jocks crowd in silence below the yellow balcony of FDR’s Little White House. I stood with Sam and just watched. I could see Grace Tully and a man I didn’t recognize close behind the First Lady. A hot yellow light found its way through the shade of the sycamores and hemlock enough to make everybody sweat like slaves.

There were tears in the air but not in the eyes of the women making their way to the row of cars and the hearse.

I thought about the newsreels of Roosevelt at Teheran and then at Yalta. The man’s health had fallen off a cliff.

 

By the time Dombrowski arrived on the North Central Michigan Railroad back in Cheboygan most of the news was coming from Germany and Okinawa. The Ninth Army had crossed the Elbe. The Russians were fighting street by street in Berlin. We were in trouble on the southern end of Okinawa and kamikazes filled the sky like swarms of angry hornets.

In front of the train station piles of snow rose halfway up the new electric street light poles. There’d been a big wet snow storm while he was down south. But it was cold like February again and everybody would have to put up with the snow for another month.

Dombrowski’s upstairs apartment hung over the river. One window facing the water stared out through barren maple trees and the other looked down on what used to be the great south end of Main Street. It was damp and cold as he stepped inside. Flies lay dead as doornails on the window sills.

He threw his overcoat over the back of a lonely brown couch. When he turned the valve on the radiator, it started hissing like a miniature steam powered train. It’d be hours before it was warm enough to enjoy eating anything. All he had was Quaker Oats so it was no great loss. He sat on the couch and lit a fag. The smoke drifted through his place like there were no walls at all. A big wind was up off the lake.

He called Sam at the garage in Georgia but the phone rang off the wall. Maybe they let him go when Roosevelt’s body left for D.C. That kind of shit happened all the time.

Poison. There wasn’t a man or woman in the world who wanted to hear anything about poison in the same sentence with the words Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

 

During the night a storm threw a blanket of one inch ice over the giant piles of snow pushed into the middle of downtown Cheboygan. Winter was making a big time comeback. Like a prize fighter when he gets up from the mat and gets back in the match. Dombrowski tried making breakfast but the eggs and hash tasted like raw flesh. He opened the door, walked down the frigid hallway, and out into frozen streets.

At the side door of the Tribune Building, Tom Romenik met him at the line of coat hooks along the wall.

“I send you to Georgia and get nothing for it. That cost the paper over $150, not including your mechanic at Warm Springs.”

“My story wasn’t so bad, Tom. You didn’t print it because you didn’t need another soft one.”

“It was mush.”

“My mind was somewhere else.”

“Listen, Stan. You don’t have a piss pot to piss in. I’m paying your rent. Go interview Mrs. Bilitzke. She’s got a son and a daughter in Europe and two boys fighting the Japs. They’re all officers. All near the front lines. It’ll make a good local angle. We’re doing the Honor Roll Issue this week. It’s yours.”

The Honor Roll issue. Shit. Dombrowski hated the idea of it.

At his desk he opened his mail. It was all crap. The light hanging over his desk made the cigarette smoke from the ashtray look like a camp fire. He called Mrs. Bilitzke.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

Commander Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria sent for Karasov the day before. It had taken the agent a day to get to Moscow from his NKVD station in the Crimea. His train was filled with fresh faced soldiers heading to war for the first time to help finish it. Karasov was on his way to start a new one.

He waited in Beria’s Kremlin office. The golden walls were bare except for two great flags: a great red one with a yellow sickle and hammer and the other softer with a blood red silhouette of Stalin in the middle. The desk was empty save a single pen in a French ink well and a matching leather blotter. The fireplace in the center of the room begged for a blaze but looked unused for a generation.

The most powerful and sinister man in Russia entered the room like a ghost, no one with him because he was untouchable, the caretaker of every secret in the Soviet Union. He was the man who killed a million people to make a point and everyone in Russia with any knowledge of the truth knew it. The people did not.

“Comrade Karasov. So very good to have you in Moscow at last.”

“I’ve been waiting for this, Commander.”

“We know you have. You have earned it. You have earned it indeed.”

“Thank you.”

“We have an even more important target for you.”

“There will never a more important target.”

“Yes there is.”

“You are teasing me.”

“I do not tease, Comrade.”

“I believe you.”

“Of course you do. If you are successful you will save Bolshevism and your country. And you will be rewarded. So will your family

“What am I to do?”

“You are going to the United States of America. Do you speak English like you were taught at Columbia?”

“Yes. Even better.”

 

Karasov was not a typical agent. He had six healthy children and his wife was still one of the most beautiful women in Georgia. His expertise made him feel impervious to the purges that happened all around him since 1937. He’d cared not a lick who won the little battles for power that erupted inside the Commissariat. He knew the chemistry of death.

After Karasov unrolled his woolen bedroll on the cot in the Kremlin room reserved for guests of the secret service, he sat down with a cup of black tea he’d only been able to warm to simple tepidness on the small electric burner provided for him. In five minutes he was on his back staring at the ornate Byzantine ceiling.

He fell asleep. In a dream he saw Elizaveta in their bedroom looking out at the beach and the black sea beyond. She reached for him in the night. He felt her warm sweet breath caressing his neck, her fingers tempting him with a stroke along his inner thigh, her still jet black hair tumbling across the silk pillows she purchased from a man at her favorite open market.

 

Dombrowski had the same dream every night. He saw the president talking with him on the porch in Warm Springs. They were alone. The interview was going like he had hoped. Even better. The old man was pouring out details about the war no one had heard. They were instant friends. It was all on the record.

Suddenly a man dressed like John Wilkes Booth strode up the lawn, raised an automatic Kalashnikov pistol, and shot FDR right in the middle of the forehead. He pointed the gun at Dombrowski. There was a thunderous crack. A hollow point bullet struck his arm at the elbow, shattering his bone in white splinters that filled the air with dust.

The pounding of Tom Romanik on his hallway door woke him up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

The pounding of Tom Romanik on his hallway door woke him up.

“You look terrible.”

“Couldn’t sleep, Tom.”

Tom ripped him a good one about not following through with Mrs. Bilitzke. He said one more slip up like that and he’d have to let him go. Tom didn’t mean it, Dombrowski could tell, maybe three or four more uninspiring or forgetful reporter moments and Tom might do something about it. But not now, especially with half his staff off to war.

He met the Bilitzke family at the Carnation Restaurant on Main Street and joined them at a table near the window. April had turned back into winter. Two more feet of snow.

Mrs. Bilitzke’s brother, Jimmy Kwiatkowski, sat at the window table next to his sister. He’d been too old for this war but not the last. He had a scar across his narrow cheek from a German bayonet at Verdun. Jimmy looked out at Main with a gap-toothed smile, his white thinning hair spread on his dandruffed shoulders. Deep lines cut into his face like dry canyons in the desert. His eyes were fierce but the rest of him looked tired inside his long black coat.

Grand nephews and grand nieces sat along the soda counter watching them. They all wore floppy working caps. Their dads were off to war and didn’t need the heavy wool emblems of the great American working class for now. Their mom’s waited at home for a great reunion somewhere downstream when the Japs were done once and for all. Or they worked at the factory across the river, where the fisheries used to be, making drive shafts for the Willy’s plant in Toledo.

He took out his reporters’ notepad and his pencil.

“Do get letters from your kids very often, Mrs. Bilitzke?

“Yes. I get about ten a week. Don’t you think so, Jimmy?”

“Yup. About ten a week. Sometimes fifteen or so.”

The old lady was pretty damn old but she had the eyes and shape of a younger woman. Her hair was both grey and not grey and tucked in a bun behind her neck. Her netted hat tilted on her head like the movie stars wore them. Like Barbara Stanwick.

“You’re planning something big when they get back?”

“No. They just serve their country like everybody else.”

“Of course.” Dombrowski was not himself and he knew it. He was asking the wrong kind of questions like he was drunk or something. ‘Do your job’ he said to himself under his breath. “How do you feel about Roosevelt dying last week?”

“Goodness. How do you think I felt? I am so sad he didn’t get to see us polish off the Japanese.”

Dombrowski felt like a knucklehead. He was insulting a very nice lady with four children on the front lines.

 

When Karasov boarded the ferry for Edinburgh he noticed someone was following him. The man’s hair was red and blonde and bright as a sunrise over the Black Sea. He wore a strange white raincoat and a felt fedora, floppy and dark wool green. The man looked vaguely familiar but Karasov dismissed the recognition because Beria had told him he was on his own. Besides, he thought, who else could get to a man in the most secretive place in all of America, the high desert of New Mexico.

 

The phone rang at Dombrowski’s desk at the Tribune.

“Dombrowski.” He listened for a couple of seconds and realized it was Sam. “Sam. Thanks for calling me back.”

“You believe me?”

“I need a story. I gotta have facts.”

“I got no facts, Mr. Dombrowski.”

“I gotta have facts.”

“You’ll have to call someone. I have his number.”

“Who’s this someone?”

“My Uncle Dave.”

“Your Uncle Dave?”

“Yeah. My Uncle Dave. He got me this job.”

“I’m trying to stick with you here, Sam.”

“He’s in the Secret Service.”

“Okay. Give me his number.”

 

Karasov stepped off the ship in New York and looked up at the skyline. The city was beautiful and it stunk like a factory. He remembered it well from his days in college paid for by the NKVD. He walked up to the first man he saw.

“Please tell me the most inexpensive way to get to Grand Central,” he asked in perfect Midwestern English. He’d told himself to be sure to strike up a conversation with someone random, a New Yorker, to be sure he remembered the American way of looking away and then looking you in the eye again. “I don’t have a lot of money.”

“Where you going?” the guy was real New York wharf. This was just what he was looking for.

“Omaha.”

“What’s in Omaha?”

New Yorkers are direct. It was the first thing he realized during his one year at Columbia. It was a good thing to know because the rest of America was less so. Karasov knew his freshman roommate, Charles Wallings, lived in Nebraska. It was designed as part of his cover to go there and look up Charlie’s family. Charles was in Alaska someplace pointing a rifle at imaginary Japanese invaders. Christ, he thought, the Japanese are too busy fighting a retreat to their crowded little island to invade a place like Alaska. It made him laugh.

 

“Dave. This is Stan Dombrowski from the Cheboygan Daily Tribune.”

“Right. I’ve been expecting your call.”

“Your brother Sam said we had something to talk about.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It depends on your abilities.”

“What abilities?”

“To keep your mouth shut, Mr. Dombrowski.”

“That’s not what reporters do, Dave.”

“Well then. We are through.”

“We’re just getting started.”

“No we are not.”

Dombrowski walked out onto Main Street after he heard the dial tone on his phone. The prick hung up on him. Down the street through a cloud of snow he could see the neon lights of the Blue Lude saloon lighting the sidewalks of the Ottawa Hotel. Nick had a poker game in the basement and Dombrowski was in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Four

 

 

The train was filled with guys going to San Francisco on their way to the Pacific Theatre. They looked so fucking positive it made Karasov happy like he was part of it though he was the exact opposite.

When the train pulled into the Union Pacific’s Omaha Burlington Station, the grandest building west of the Mississippi, Karasov gathered his things from the baggage compartment with the help of a handsome but overweight Negro porter. At the bottom of the steps his contact met him with a handshake. He was a weasel of man, Jewish with a GI Haircut. They walked beneath the grand staircase and the Corinthian columns of Colorado Granite reaching high to the domed ceiling. They said nothing to each other. His contact had no name and Karasov wanted it that way. The little man had ears that stuck out like a rabbit’s. A long trench coat of shiny beige leather hung to his knees. Something he shouldn’t have been wearing if didn’t want the people of Nebraska to notice him let alone an OSS man.

Across Tenth Street, a car waited for them in a purple downpour of a sudden thunderstorm. Electric lights on the corner flickered with the rattle of a lightning strike outside of the city. Karasov thought about Elizeveta, her smell at night of lavender and raspberries. He thought about what he knew about the myth of tornadoes.

 

Lavrentiy Beria sat in his study with his wife in the outside room with her servants. He studied the letter from Stalin. His wife was pretty woman in the face but fat like all women her age in the Soviet Union. He’d never taken a mistress or dozen of mistresses like the rest of the men in the Politburo.

Stalin’s signature along with the message made him sweat under his collar like a schoolboy on his first date.

 

Dombrowski had two Jacks and two Tens. That was enough. He pushed his pile forward. He had to get to work. The Honor Roll issue.

Nick looked at him funny.

“Call.”

“Hey, Stan. What are you doing?

“What have you got, Nick?”

“I can’t cover that today. I know that’s what you’re looking for. Besides, we were gonna play all afternoon. Right?”

Johnny Spies and Mickey Lindy had the same look on their faces as Nick. They were the too biggest crooks in town and got out of the draft because they made things happen around town when nobody else could and they were too fat to fight. They could have been twins. Both red heads in white shirts and suspenders.

Nick was a slender guy. Hollow scarred cheeks. He ran the Blue Lude for Mr. Hennessy.

“C’mon, Nick. What have you got?”

“Three threes.”

“Crap.”

“You can’t cover either. Your markers are worthless. We all know that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Stan… ”

“Yeah. I know.”

Out on the frigid street of the city, Nick followed Dombrowski, his thin blond hair floating in the wind behind his ears and drifting like snow across the shoulders of his pea coat.

“Listen, Stan. You’re drinking too much. I know it. You know it. The boys know it,” he said. “C’mon. Get your story together for the paper and come back next week.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Nick.”

“It’s easy for anybody to say.”

“Go do your crap for Hennessey.”

“You go to hell.”

Dombrowski walked on the ice of the sidewalk and fell on his ass. Twice. At the Armed Services Office in the county building he picked up the photos and service information he needed to do the story. Inside the package store he got a look from Mr. Cauklin that told him the old man smelled the Manhattan’s he’d thrown down under the rafters and next to the boiler when he thought he was gonna win at cards. He left the store with a small bottle of blended Scotch the pocket of his overcoat.

At his desk at the Tribune no one bothered Dombrowski for three hours because they knew the look on his face. Papers covered his desk. Dust poured through the room. They were off-loading great rolls of newsprint off the truck from Saginaw and it always filled the place with specks of white grey powder. The stuff clogged up the typewriters real good.

The words came easily though Dombrowski despised every key stroke. The Bilitzke story was better than the others. He gave the old lady the right quotes, the ones she volunteered before

Dombrowski’s interview got rude. As he sobered up, he regretted pushing his own agenda with her. She was just a nice old lady with kids near or on the front lines.

Forty seven guys and one nurse from Cheboygan were dead. Two hundred fifty five wounded. Seventeen missing in action. Eleven in Europe and seven spread across the Pacific Theatre. Four hundred and forty two officers serving their country. Over two thousand enlisted GI’s, sailors, and Marines. Thirty Coast Guard boys. One dead in Lake Erie clearing the ice.

In the back hallway he reached into the pocket of his coat for the whiskey bottle, Mary from the front office yelled through the open rooms.

“Stan! Call for you!”

Mary was pretty. Dark brown hair, a flat nose, and skin like milk and honey. Her boyfriend was in Italy doing something very secret for the Navy. He knew she was sweet on him.

It wasn’t another Cheboygan citizen telling him about one of the boys in the fight. It was Dave Swinehart from Washington D.C.

“Mr. Dombrowski. I need something from you.”

“What’s that?”

“You’re taking a trip for us.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Five

 

Stan Dombrowski stepped off the train in Grand Rapids and glanced down at his reporter’s pad where the notes he’d made about talking to Charlotte were underlined. She was due to pick him up. He was sure she’d be waiting in the line of cars outside the station. She was.

Dombrowski told Tom Romanik what Dave Swinehart had told him to say. Dombrowski told Tom his wife was ill. People, Dave said, don’t check up on stuff like that.

The rain was brown. Sheets of it pounded the cement by the curb and raised a fountain of dirt left over from winter.

“Charlotte. You look nice,” he said getting into the passenger seat of her dad’s Ford. “Didn’t know you could drive.”

“You don’t know a lot of things.”

She crossed in front of a yellow and black cab competing for the rush of mostly men in raincoats and hats and uniforms. She opened her window for air as the car slipped farther right away form the oncoming traffic. Her tar black hair smelled like lilacs. That always made Stan Dombrowski a little weak in the knees.

“So what don’t I know?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“I’m the old man?”

“Yeah. When I was up the last time to tag the stuff I wanted. You got me half drunk. It was the big goodbye. Remember?”

“Sure.”

“What am I supposed to do? I’ve already filed for divorce.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re always sorry.”

“No I’m not.”

“Okay. I’m wrong on that one.”

“Seriously. What are you planning to do about it?”

“Have it.”

“Of course. What about after that?”

“My folks will help me out.”

“Do they know?”

“Mom does.”

“Christ. Your dad will go nuts.”

“I know. That’s why he doesn’t know yet. What are you going to do about it, Stan?”

“You want me to tell him?”

“No.”

“Then what the hell do you want me to do?”

“Try to fix this marriage. Give it a shot. You’re going to be a father for Christ’s sake.”

“I can do it.”

“You sound like a kid, Stan.”

“I’m on my way to New Mexico.”

“New Mexico?”

“Yeah. New Mexico. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“For what?”

“For a story.”

“What the hell kind of story are you going to write about in the damn desert? What does a little city paper like the Tribune have to do with this?”

“Can’t tell you. You’ve got forget I said anything about it.”

“I’m having your child, Stan. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does.”

“You don’t love me and I’m having a baby.”

 

Beria held his first grandchild in his arms as he sat on his daughter’s couch in Leningrad. Lamilla, his first born, brought him tea as he smooched the baby with his scratchy beard. He expected a phone call from Joseph Stalin but ignored his fear for his family and simply enjoyed the rare warm night air as it crossed from the harbor through his villa and drifted into the countryside.

 

Karasov walked down J. J. Pershing Drive in Omaha under the spring bloom of newly mature elm trees. The great Midwestern city planned by the great Horace Cleveland in 1889. World famous.

The Wallings house was easy to spot. When Charlie got drunk in the bars of New York he’d describe it to the cigarette girl in detail. Porch like a plantation home. Spiked crows nest library high in the sky. Victorian god damned masterpiece.